New App Will Whisk You Away to a Random, Mystery Bar

You prefer classic rock-playing dive bars with a good beer selection. Your significant other prefers cocktail pouring speakeasies with live gypsy jazz. Now, thanks to a new web app, you’ll never have to fight about which one you’ll spend your Saturday at again.

Bar Roulette takes advantage of the Yelp and Uber APIs to randomly pick a bar from the former and then whisk you away in a car from the latter. The intended result is a mysterious adventure where you don’t know where you’ll be drinking until you arrive.

Currently only available on the web (but with an iPhone app supposedly coming soon), Bar Roulette does its best to make sure you’ll be happy with its only-somewhat-random selection. First of all, you can choose the radius of how far you’re willing to travel so that you don’t end up at the Golden Nugget in Laughlin, Nevada. The site also claims that all the bars it selects are “highly rated” on Yelp – so your disappointment will only be as great as your lack of confidence in the Yelp community. According to app creator Tyler Swartz, “It even checks to make sure the bar is open so it works on Saturday morning...I won't judge.”

Also important, once you arrive, your intended destination pops up on your screen leaving no confusion as to where Bar Roulette was trying to send you – though there’s nothing stopping you from wandering into the bar next door.

Though using the app obviously includes a bit of inherent risk, it sounds like it could be a fun way to get a night started – you know, assuming it drops you off at a place that doesn’t mind that you’re wearing Reefs and the Red Sox hat you’ve had since ninth grade.